Mining Your Experience

Where good stories hide

Before writing answers, list candidate episodes from the last few years: projects you shipped or rescued, incidents and outages you handled, disagreements about design or priorities, mistakes and failed launches, times you mentored or were mentored, moments you changed a process, and work outside your job description. Look at old pull requests, design docs, performance reviews, retrospectives, chat history you are allowed to access and your calendar to jog your memory. Students and career changers can draw on internships, course projects, open-source contributions, hackathons, clubs, volunteering and previous careers. Aim for perhaps 8 to 12 real episodes; you will refine them later.

Prepare stories, not scripts

A small set of well-understood stories can answer most behavioural questions.

Brainstorm prompts

Answer quickly; do not filter yet.

Projects     - What am I proudest of? What was hardest?
             - What shipped late, and why?
Incidents    - Which outage or bug did I help resolve?
People       - Who did I disagree with? Who did I help grow?
             - Who was hard to work with, and what did I learn?
Mistakes     - What did I get wrong, and what changed afterwards?
Ambiguity    - When were the requirements unclear or changing?
Initiative   - What did I fix that nobody asked me to?
Pressure     - When did I have to cut scope to hit a date?
Feedback     - What tough feedback did I receive and act on?

Only use real stories

Never invent or borrow stories. Fabrications usually collapse under follow-up questions, and honesty is itself one of the things being assessed. A modest true story beats an impressive invented one.

त्वरित जाँच: Which is a good source for jogging your memory about past work?

• Old design docs, pull requests and retrospectives
• Other candidates’ answers found online
• A story you invent the night before
• Only your job title